“The irony that, as a lyricist or a poet, I have no other way to describe it than I fucking love it,” she laughs with exasperation.
That profoundly precious love, one that surpasses most explanation, has pushed Taylor to perform and play for nearly a decade now.
After spending time in Canada and the United Kingdom, the singer/songwriter packed her acoustic guitar with her, and eventually found her way back to her hometown of Melbourne.
Without contacts of notoriety, she initially found the return to Australia’s music capital difficult. Eventually, she used her experience from living abroad to take initiative, approach venues, and book her own gigs, performing routinely across the city.
Despite loving performing, without a merch stand, she felt something missing from her shows. New EP Two, was the remedy.
“I’ve always just written and performed, it never hit me to have it as a product. Performing was something I always did because I love it. But I was always playing and people were into the music, I just had nothing to give them, I’ve never had anything to sell at gigs.”
Choosing to piece together Two and take a practical approach to her role as a musician was spurred on by her previous EP release, a collaboration with Delsinki Records’ Craig Johnston.
“Last year, I made an EP with my friend Craig, and that got some traction, got us spots on some festivals and radio play, and that gave me a kick up the arse to go into the business level of musicianship.”
Creating her first piece of merch, and acknowledging the business side of her chosen career, has seen her come leaps and bounds beyond a creative space she was in not long ago. For several years, her perfectionism got in the way of creating. Taylor fell into a self-proclaimed rut.
“It was so awful,” she says. “I fell into this trap of if it’s not perfect, I was a failure, and then if I didn’t try, I couldn’t fail. So I started playing covers every weekend. And it was good, the money was decent, but it started to corrode my soul. Don’t get me wrong, I love to play covers, and there’s fun that comes from that. I learned to interact with an audience, and it affords me the opportunity to do other things, like touring and travelling,” she says, before pausing, again searching for the right words.
“Have you ever read Oh the Places You’ll Go?” she asks brightly, referring to the Dr. Seuss storybook about the challenging journey of being alive. “I realised, oh my gosh, I’m totally in The Waiting Place. I’m the queen of The Waiting Place.”
In the story, The Waiting Place is an area where people go to wait for something else to happen, wasting away their time, and ceasing to live in the moment.
“I realised that’s bullshit, if you do that nothing happens. I realised that with writing, you’ve got to be okay with most of it being shit. But you need to rifle through the shit to find some gold. And Craig was really instrumental in that, no pun intended,” she finishes.
“When you’re really honest, painfully honest, about what you’re saying, and you can lyrically come up with it and say it to someone, you’ll find there’s at least one person in the audience who relates to it.
“That’s what I love about songwriting. And when you can get a musician to work alongside you and their music compliments that track, that’s the best, it’s magic. I imagine it’s how surfers feel, or skydivers when they’re flying.”
Not content to sing only words by other musicians,
or stay at home playing guitar in her kitchen;
Brooke Taylor flees to the stage, to the place she calls home,
One of the many wonderful places she’ll go.
